Psychology and Crime News

"Noun labels have a powerful influence on our thoughts and beliefs about others. In the criminal justice system, potential jurors who repeatedly hear a defendant being called a 'strangler' in the press might be more likely to support a death sentence for that defendant," Giles, assistant professor of psychology in the Vanderbilt Peabody College of Education and Human Development, said. "That these labels might also be used to manipulate, inflame or prejudice the general public is of substantial interest in light of recent political rhetoric concerning 'terrorists' and 'evildoers.'"

Giles' recent research found that both children and adults are more likely to have a negative, fixed view of people described with a noun, such as "evildoer" or "murderer," than a person described as "someone who does evil things" or "someone who commits murder." Giles presented the research at the meeting of the Cognitive Development Society in San Diego Oct. 21.

[... ] Giles has conducted multiple studies examining the impact on adults and children of using nouns to describe violence and aggression. In a recent study, 90 adults were given surveys about what they believe causes violence, their perceptions of the effectiveness of criminal rehabilitation and their attitudes toward legal sanctions. In one version, the survey questions used the word “murderer”; questions in the other version used “people who commit murder.” She found that participants whose surveys used the term “murderer” were more likely to respond that the person described is inherently violent and will not change, more likely to endorse punitive legal sanctions and less likely to view rehabilitation as effective.

Comment: The research presented at the CDS conference was a poster, and did not deal with beliefs in adults.

Priming Effects In Children's Reasoning About Aggression
Jessica Giles
(j.giles@vanderbilt.edu)
Two studies examined whether priming children with linguistic cues such as noun labels might affect their reasoning about aggression. In Study 1, preschoolers who heard the term "evildoer" were more likely to infer stability, resistance to intervention, and innate causation than were children who heard about a character who "does evil things whenever he can." In Study 2, elementary school-aged children displayed similar patterns of essentialist reasoning when they were presented with noun labels such as "bully". These studies contribute
to a growing body of evidence suggesting that children use nouns as powerful cues regarding entitativity and the fundamental nature of things.